Biography
Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Tala Madani: Biscuits, a recent North American survey at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2023, brought together fifteen years of the artist’s incisive work. Her work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2014); and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). Madani received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and is the recipient of the 2023 Visual Artist Award by the Fine Arts Work Center, the 2020 Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, and the 2013 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting from the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.